Quest to find a light web browser, not on Webkit

[kgdrenefort]

Hello,

I have to use, maybe for a while, as my main computer a paper-weight (Asus Chromebook C200M).

Context:

It runs pretty much fine on Gentoo with Xfce.

My main problem is, while compiling (since my binhost is in maintenance actually), I took one core for emerge and it leaves only a single core for the whole system. Having 4Gb of ram, I can't even set -j2 without half of the compilation failing on memory exhaustion.

Firefox, without a compilation beside, is running fine (mostly, regarding the hardware). But once it compiles, it's usable, merely you can't go on Youtube or some awfully website as Reddit. Too much Javascript, I guess, are the main problem here, beside website not optimized.

Technically my computer is less powerful than a Rasperry Pi 4, the only good things is I have an NVMe on it.

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Quest:

I want a web browser, without Webkit (for different reasons, such as I hate Google and the compilation of webkit is a circle in hell by itself, specially on my paper-weight).

It has to be light, too, removing useless features (who cares if my web browser can read a PDF, seriously ?) as any form of request from the project (as do Mozilla very often, I guess it could leads to useless ressource usage).

Finally, it has to be compatible with plugins as uBlock Origin, or any type of ads filter.

My last experience with another web browser was probably Midori, which was absolutely not able to block a sick kitten, as for ads… It was just a lie to say it was working :).

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I saw some Firefox's alternatives, such as GNU Icecat, LibreWolf…

But since any compilation would take a while on this machine, I'll avoid to run one if I'm not a bit sure of what I'll use.

Any recommandation ?

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Alternative question:

Do you think local USE flag as pgo, lto, jumbo-build, beside making the compilation really longer, would help Firefox to be more reactive ? I do not really care about the runtime, firefox compiled with default use flag didn't takes a lot of time. I'm more concerned once it started.

Regards,
GASPARD DE RENEFORT Kévin
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[kgdrenefort]

I'm trying one recommanded on #gentoo-chat, elinks.

So far it seems to works more or less good on forums.gentoo.org (I am replying with it currently, that is a test) and could read wiki.gentoo.org.

Aside I try to compile from git's source dillo-plus.

Regards,
GASPARD DE RENEFORT Kévin
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[wjb]

I use www-client/firefox-bin on my two weakest machines, of which one is a laptop from 2008 with 2G RAM. This might be a bit slow sometimes but can basically handle most things.

[C5ace]

Try www-client/netsurf.
www.netsurf-browser.org
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[siljrath]

Besides exploring the output of

[Zucca]

[RumpletonBongworth]

Pale Moon contains a fork of the Gecko engine that wilfully avoids the multiprocess overhaul that Firefox was eventually subjected to and can therefore be expected to use less RAM. It does a fairly good job of contending with the 'modern' web, though it's not as broadly compatible as modern Firefox and Chromium-based browsers. I'm not sure what the situation is as concerns Gentoo packaging, however. Other than Pale Moon, the options are pretty dire, unless you are willing to forgo any semblance of compatibility with the web at large. That being said, Ladybird is worth keeping an eye on.

As an aside, and having only 4G, you would likely benefit from having swap as zram and setting a fairly high swappiness value to induce RAM compression. These days, operating systems such as Windows, macOS and iOS perform RAM compression in some situations. There is an interesting Reddit thread concerning the topic (just be sure to ignore the cretinous posts by FeelingShred).

[e8root]

Seamonkey is another interesting Gecko based browser.
It uses older open source Mozilla Browser codebase mixed with developments from Firefox. It is full fledged browser with YT compatibility, WebGL and even WebAssembly.

Build time on my PC is less than 5 minutes versus almost 26 minutes for Firefox. Chromium takes few times as much as the Firefox still.
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[RumpletonBongworth]